GEOPOLITICS AND GEOSTRATEGIES: TENDENCIES AND PERSPECTIVES
THE CULTURAL DIMENSION
OF GLOBALIZATION
Cultural globalization refers to the growth
in the exchange of cultural practices between
nations and peoples. Although this is a process
that has undoubtedly occurred for thousands
of years, economic and political globalization
has enhanced the process enormously in recent
decades. In addition, many analysts point to the
way new technologies and their exploitation such
as commercial air travel, satellite television, mass
telecommunications and the internet have created
a world where billions of people consume identical
cultural products – such as pop music, soap opera
and sporting events – and employ cultural practices
they would never otherwise have encountered
– such as foreign food preparations and foreign
words and phrases.
At the heart of much of the rise of cultural
globalization has been the massive expansion of
the entertainment and communications industry
fuelled, in particular, by the spread of television.
Television has become the key to the development
of pop music, news services, advertising, sport and
light entertainment with an appeal and enormous
money-making potential across the whole world.
Key-words: globalization; culture; civilization;
nationalism; Westernization.
Introduction
Few expressions of globalization are as visible,
widespread and pervasive as the world-wide
proliferation of internationally traded consumer
brands, the global ascendancy of popular
cultural icons and artifacts, and the simultaneous
* Professor Gheorghe TOMA, PhD (gtoma49@yahoo.com) is prorector of “Mihai Viteazul”
National Intelligence Academy, Bucharest, Romania.
STRATEGIC IMPACT No. 1/2012
Gheorghe TOMA, PhD*
communication of events by satellite broadcasts to
hundreds of millions of people on all continents.
“The most public symbols of globalization con-
sist of Coca - Cola, Madonna and the CNN news.
Whatever the causal and practical significance of
these phenomena, there can be little doubt that one
of the most directly perceived and experienced
forms of globalization is the cultural form”1.
Despite the complexity of cultural interactions
between societies over the last three millennia, the
intensifying movement of images and symbols and
the extraordinary stretch of modes of thought and
of communications are unique and unparalleled
features of the late twentieth and the new
millennium.
We have moved from “a world dominated by
cultural isolation in a world where intercultural
factors dominate, from an era characterized
by cultural autonomy of traditional isolated
groups to an era of generalized interrelations and
communication” 2.
Our time has the great historical privilege of
moving from a world of isolated civilizations,
based to some extent on different spaces and
times, to a single world, which is characterized
by the same space (world market) and the same
time (synchronicity of all events), birth of a
communication and of a world community.
The community has always taken precedence
over communication; the latter being first
developed inside the group: individuals speaking
the same language, sharing the same religion, the
same values, the same history, the same traditions
and the same memory. At present, we notice a shift
31
 GEOPOLITICS AND GEOSTRATEGIES: TENDENCIES AND PERSPECTIVES
from a planet of closed civilizations to a world
open to all people through travel and media.
1. Cultural Development
We can state there is a close connection
between globalization, history and culture. In this
respect, D. Held, A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J.
Perraton, in their book “Global transformations:
politics, economics and culture”, make a detailed
presentation of the historical forms of cultural
globalization. Thus, the author analyzes pre-
modern and modern globalization.
Before the Modern Age, “world religions and
empires offered the most important cultural and
institutional complexes that made the cultural
interaction and long distance communication
possible and through which strong and extended
cultural interacting relations might prevail. Trade
was a key-vehicle for this spreading of ideas and
of artifacts on long distances”.3
Because of logistic limitations of the leadership
based exclusively on military force, the empire
capitals attempted to build lasting alliances
among the elites, beyond ethnic and geographical
divisions.
Even where the strategy failed from the
perspective of building up the empire, there
was the possibility that it might leave behind a
distinctive cultural heritage. For example, the
ephemeral Macedonian Empire of Alexander the
Great had been the essence for the spreading of
Greek language, science, philosophy and Greek
literature in the Middle East. The Roman Empire
offered the institutional framework through which
first the Hellenistic culture and then Christianity
could infiltrate in Northern Africa and Western and
Northern Europe.
Even though cultures had relations with other
cultures, and religions with other religions, the
contacts had not always been fruitful. The regional
feature of world religions reflects border lines and
discrepancies between them and the empires they
encountered. Even more, hardly did most of the
people understand those great cultural interactions
– the identities, the beliefs and rituals were mostly
local. Between the village and the great empires,
there were very few cultural exchanges”.
The Han Empire in China provided a similar
framework for the spread of Chinese writing,
literature, science and technology. Although
32 STRATEGIC IMPACT No. 1/2012
these cultures communicated with other cultures,
and religions with other religions, the meetings
were not always fertile. The regional character
of world religions reflected the cleavages and
divisions among them and the empires with which
they intertwined. Furthermore, most people have
often caught just a glimpse of these great cultural
interactions – as identities, habits and faiths were
mostly local. Between the stat and the great empires
there are very few cultural forms4.
After the fall of Rome and of the Han Dynasty in
China and after the first wave of Islamic expansion,
empires continued to rise and fall. Nevertheless,
up to the 15th and 16th centuries, when the Western
imperial adventures began, there are no historical
events comparable to the military and cultural
expansion of Islam. The great emperors were
nomad warriors from the Eurasian steppes. But
their cultural innovations did not overcome their
military talent. Their campaigns and their conquests
led to the reconsidering of the old cultural models
and not their transformation. European empires
will have finally become efficient instruments of
the cultural power abroad, but only starting with
the 18th century, after the birth of nationalism and
of nation-states in Europe and in both Americas.
Inside this area, there had been gradually redefined
complex models of cultural streams between
aristocrats, as well as the distinctive area of the
local folk features.
States were searching for united nations in order
to rule them and nationalists were searching for
auto-determination through states. Consequently,
although the process was uneven and contested,
more and more cultural institutions and cultural
flows began to fix themselves within the frontiers
of the developing nation-states. More and more
cultural institutions and cultural streams got to
set their place between the borders of the forming
nation-states.
Language, school, means of transportation
and communication, liturgical ritual and identity,
all had been defined more and more from the
perspective of the nations territorially bordered.
External or foreign influences were rejected or
treated in a suspicious and hostile manner. But,
in the Occident, the cosmopolitanism and the
internationalism continued to exist, as well as the
trans-national cultural practices and institutions.
Indeed, from the heart of the European system
of the nation-states “ideologies and secular strong
 GEOPOLITICS AND GEOSTRATEGIES: TENDENCIES AND PERSPECTIVES
discourses had arisen – liberalism, Marxism and
modern science – whose rationalism from Enlight-
enment suggested, entitled or not, the attraction
and the universal applicability. Still, generally, na-
tionalism was the one that became the most pow-
erful cultural force, partly because it was system-
atically and financial supported and displayed by
the modern states. According to this interpretation,
the climax of cultural globalization is placed in the
past, while the most powerful and significant cul-
tural streams and relations developed between the
borders of the modern nation-states” 5.
2. Cultural Dimension
Globalization changes the way in which we
conceptualize culture, because culture has been
localized for a very long time in a certain space.
Does global modernism promise to offer us a global
culture? In a certain way it might be said that such
a culture already exists. As Ulf Hannerz writes,
“today there is a world culture, but it advisable to
understand what it means. The total homogeneity
of the expressional and signifying systems has not
taken place yet and there is no probability to be
seen very soon. But the world has become a net of
social relations and, between its various regions,
there is a movement of meanings similar to the
movement of people and goods.” 6.
What U. Hannerz wants to say is that nowadays
we have a globalization of culture in the sense of
complex interconnection.
The integration context of the cultural practices
and experiences into the web, world wide, may
be seen as a global culture. This meaning must be
separated from the one according to which global
culture is understood as a unique and homogenized
signifying system. Global culture “is like the birth
of a single culture, gathering all the people in
the world and replacing the diversity of cultural
systems used before.”
Obviously, such a culture has not appeared
yet.
Of course, the idea of a global culture has
not become possible only in the days of global
modernism. The great cultural statements and
texts could overpass the linguistic, political, civil
and cultural borders provided that they should
be translated into the languages of the interested
cultural communities. But, along centuries, the
process has been delayed by the geographic
STRATEGIC IMPACT No. 1/2012
distances, by the slowness of travelling or by
technical difficulties.
Along with the development of globalization,
made possible by media and the contemporary
means of transportation, the movements of the texts
(religious, political, literary, scientific ideas) has
speeded up. Political, cultural and religious powers
proved themselves incapable of stopping people
to travel or the development of communications
(parabolic TV antennas, video tapes, Internet),
so the circulation of ideas and opinions. We enter
the age of the generalized mixture of cultures and
civilizations, of discourses and passions.
Cultural globalization “stands not only for
empirical human contacts between civilizations
(the revolution of the means of transportation), and
also for the intellectual instruments of mediation
between groups put together in more or less brutal
manner”.
We should call humanistic sciences those
intellectual instruments, giving them a sufficiently
extended meaning: History, Philology, Linguistics,
Archaeology, Sociology, Philosophy etc.
In the attempt of creating a global culture,
speaking some world wide spread languages has
an important role. Undoubtedly, in the top of the
hierarchy is English language, used in the whole
world, in all its forms: written, spoken, formal,
informal, and also in its functional styles: economic,
legal, technical, journalistic etc. It has become
the lingua franca by excellence and continues to
strengthen this domination through a process of
self-consolidation. It became the central language
of international communication in the business,
political, administrative, scientific and academic
area, at the same time being the dominant language
used in global advertising and popular culture.
The main language used in IT is English,
being the written code for Windows and Internet
protocols. “More than two thirds of the scientists
in the world write in English, three quarters of the
international mail are written in English and 80%
of the information of the recovering systems of
world electronic data are stocked in English”7.
Another aspect regarding the domination of the
English language is represented by book transla-
tions. Thus, an overwhelming amount of all trans-
lations in foreign languages are based originals
written in English. In a certain sense, this domina-
tion is not at all surprising. “As the destiny of the
other languages shows, the use of a language is
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 GEOPOLITICS AND GEOSTRATEGIES: TENDENCIES AND PERSPECTIVES
tightly connected to the rhythms of power. Eng-
lish is the mother language of the two hegemonic
superpowers of the modern world, Great Britain
and USA. Even more, this power is used in all the
fields of human life: economic, political, military
and last, but not least, cultural” 8.
As a consequence of the development of
information technology, we are also the witnesses
of an avalanche of scientific and technical concepts,
which are employed in most languages in their
English form. Concepts such as: businessman,
barter, broker, dealer, computer, marketing,
management, manager, dumping, know-how,
trend – are used nowadays without a translation.
This invasion of English and American concepts
can be called a “vocabulary globalization”. The
problem of the domination of one language and the
threat upon the linguistic diversity is connected to
another more general problem, that of the cultural
imperialism: the idea that a culture may be a
hegemonic one.
This pessimistic construction of the idea of
global culture was very popular at the end of
20th century. Indeed, the theory of the cultural
imperialism may be considered one of the earliest
theories of cultural globalization.
3. Culture Globalization
As Jonathan Friedman wrote, the discourse
of cultural imperialism from around the late
1960s tended to set the scene for the initial
critical reception of globalization in the cultural
sphere, casting the process as “an aspect of the
hierarchical nature of imperialism that is the
increasing hegemony of particular central cultures,
the diffusion of American values, consumer goods
and lifestyles”9.
This concept of global culture is perceived
today as the spread of the American values, goods
and lifestyle. Actually the most visible sign of
globalization appears to be the spread of American
hamburgers and Coca Cola in almost every country
on the globe.
In his book “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”,
Thomas Friedman wrote “globalization wears
Mickey Mouse ears, it drinks Pepsi and Coke, eats
Big Macs, does its computing on an IBM laptop
... in most societies people cannot distinguish
anymore between American power, American
exports, American cultural assaults, American
34 STRATEGIC IMPACT No. 1/2012
cultural exports and plain vanilla globalization”10.
The best proof to support this affirmation is
the convergence and the standardization obvious
in the cultural products in the whole world. “Take
any catalogue, from clothes to music, to film and
television, and to architecture and you could not
ignore the fact that some styles, brands, tastes and
practices now have global circulation and can be
found almost anywhere in this world”11.
Certain brands and symbols of global mass
culture have already become clichés: Coca Cola,
McDonald, Calvin Klein, Microsoft, Levis,
IBM, Nike, CNN, MTV – some even becoming
synonymous with Western cultural hegemony:
McWorld, Coca-Colonization, McDonaldization
and even McDisneyization.
But what does this homogenous distribution of
cultural goods means, if not the power of certain
capitalist enterprises to control large markets
anywhere in the world?
Considering the presence of such global
goods as a symbol of convergence towards the
capitalist monoculture means reducing culture to
its material goods; instead, culture should be seen
as a symbolization and an existentially significant
experience.
Benjamin Barber develops this vision of a
completely mediated culture by the pure principle
of transformation in consumer goods at the level
of a all-enveloping global culture, through his
idea of a McWorld: “McWorld is an entertaining
shopping experience that brings together malls,
multiplex, movie theatres, theme parks, spectator
sports arenas, fast-food chains and television (with
its burgeoning shopping networks) into a single
vast enterprise that, on the way to maximizing its
profits, transforms human beings” 12.
In spite of the evident problems connected to
welfare inequality, the transformation in consumer
goods is, currently, deeply rooted into the modern
cultural life of the developed world, and this stands
for a narrowing and an obvious convergence of the
cultural experience.
The aspects of the cultures individually
perceived, felt and interpreted in different contexts
and local traditions lead to consolidation of cultures
and thwart the linear progress of the homogenous
capitalist culture. A way of interpreting global
culture consists in the emphasizing of the need
of historical recuperation of these non-occidental
cultural traditions. Indeed, this is what can be
 GEOPOLITICS AND GEOSTRATEGIES: TENDENCIES AND PERSPECTIVES
found in A Dictionary of Global Culture, in which
Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Lewis Gate
(1998) bring items that rebalance global cultural
representation, counterbalancing the supremacy of
occidental figures and themes. Next to Toussaint’s
L’Ouverture Martin Luther appears, next to
Shakespeare, the king Zulus Shaka. But this
dictionary does not remove the persistent suspicions
concerning occidental cultural domination which
we will forthwith analyze.
These suspicions appear in the title of a book
written by Serge Latouche, a French political
economy specialist, who brings a serious accusation
to Westernization as “a tendency to planetary
uniformity” and “an international standardization
of the ways of life”.
J. Tomlinson considers that when we talk about
Westernization, we obviously refer to the spread
of European languages, especially English and
of the mercantile culture, but also to “fashion, to
gastronomy, musical and architectural formulas, to
a type of cultural expression ruled by media, to a
group of philosophical ideas and a set of values
and cultural attitudes”13.
S. Latouche considers Westernization to be a
global spread of cultural and social totality. He
analyzes certain Western elements – its technology,
industrial economic basis, tendency towards
urbanization, ethical, philosophic and religious
systems. But he insists that none of these, taken
separately, comprises the essence of the West,
which must be regarded as a “synthetic unity of
all these different manifestations, in the shape of a
cultural entity, a civilization phenomenon”.
He considers Westernization to be essentially
a cultural phenomenon. Western civilization is
for him, therefore, paradoxically anti-cultural,
because it opposes through its universalizing
tendency, to the survival of a varied group of local
cultures. Furthermore, he supports the idea that
this Westernization of culture is determined by
three factors:
• expansion of transnational companies which
have their own culture;
• urbanization process connected to the
destruction of rural communities;
• the process of building root-less states.
His critique of the West can be interpreted as
a critique of modernity. Thus, we could wonder
whether social and cultural modernity is necessary
identical with Western modernity, if becoming
STRATEGIC IMPACT No. 1/2012
modern presupposes automatically becoming a
Westerner. The Tunisian Islamist intellectual,
Rached Gannouchi, describes clearly this path
through modernity in a statement quoted by Manuel
Castells: “The only way to accede to modernity is
by our own path, that which has been traced for us
by our religion, our history and our civilization”.
A global culture, as A. Smith points out, would
therefore be composed of number of analytically
discrete elements: “effectively advertised mass
commodities, a patchwork of folk or ethnic styles
and motifs stripped of their context, some general
ideological discourse concerned with ‘human
rights and values’ and a standardized quantitative
and ‘scientific’ language of communication and
appraisal, all underpinned by the new information
and telecommunication systems and their
computerized technologies”14.
It is clear that the author is not enthusiastic with
the image he presents. He continues to describe,
a potential global culture as being fundamentally
“artificial”, “narrow”, “whimsical” and “ironic”,
“fluid and shapeless” and lacking all “emotional
involvement to what it stands for”15.
Conclusion
In short, global culture is clearly a culture
build, without history, outside time and “without
memory”.
In spite of what it is believed, namely that
globalization imposes the hegemony of culture,
reality proves that there is a cultural resistance
which endures and which becomes, as a value, ever
stronger. This resistance enables the existence of
cultural diversity, which can promote the common
interests of society. The strengthening of identities
is used, in many cases, as a control mechanism for
chaotic globalization. Furthermore, identity is an
instrument based on experience and a generator
of meaning for human life. This meaning, which
can be religious, national, ethnic, territorial or in
connection with equality of rights of gender, is
fundamental for human life and defines the world
as much as globalization and technologies.
NOTES:
1 HELD, D.; McGREW, A.; GOLDBLATT, D.;
PERRATON, J., Transformări
ări globale.. Politică,
35
 GEOPOLITICS AND GEOSTRATEGIES: TENDENCIES AND PERSPECTIVES
economie şi cultură, Polirom Publishing House,
Bucharest, 2004, p. 372.
2 LECLERC, G., Mondializarea culturală.
Civilizaţiile puse la încercare, Ştiinţa Publishing House,
Chişinău, 2003, p. 10.
3 HELD, D.; McGREW, A.; GOLDBLATT, D;
PERRATON, J., quoted work, p. 385.
4 Ibidem, p. 386.
5 Ibidem.
6 HANNERZ, U., Cosmopolitans and Locals in
World Culture, Featherstone, London, 1990.
7 TOMLINSON, J., Globalizare şi cultură,
Amarcord Publishing House, Timişoara, 2002, p. 105.
8 HELD, D.; McGREW, A.; GOLDBLATT, D.;
PERRATON, J., quoted work, p. 391.
9 FRIEDMAN, J., Cultural Identity and Global
Process, Sage, London, 1994.
10 FRIEDMAN, Th. L., Lexus şi măslinul, Cum
să înţelegem globalizarea, Fundaţia PRO Publishing
House, Bucharest, 2001, p. 400.
11 TOMLINSON, J., quoted work.
12 BARBER, B.R., Jihad versus McWorld, Incitatus
Publishing House, Bucharest, 2002, p. 97.
13 TOMLINSON, J., quoted work, p. 129.
14 SMITH, A., National Identity, London Penguin,
1991, p. 157.
15 Ibidem, p. 157.
36 STRATEGIC IMPACT No. 1/2012
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
1. BARBER, B.R., Jihad versus McWorld,
Incitatus Publishing House, Bucharest, 2002.
2. FRIEDMAN, J., Cultural Identity and
Global Process, Sage, London, 1994.
3. FRIEDMAN, Th. L., Lexus şi măslinul,
Cum să înţelegem globalizarea, Fundaţia PRO
Publishing House, Bucharest, 2001.
4. HANNERZ, U., Cosmopolitans and
Locals in World Culture, Featherstone, London,
1990.
5. HELD, D.; McGREW, A.; GOLDBLATT,
D.; PERRATON, J., Transformări globale.
Politică, economie şi cultură, Polirom Publishing
House, Bucharest, 2004.
6. LECLERC, G., Mondializarea culturală.
Civilizaţiile puse la încercare, Ştiinţa Publishing
House, Chişinău, 2003, p. 10.
7. SMITH, A., National Identity, London
Penguin, 1991.
8. TOMLINSON, J.,, Globalizare şi cultură,
Amarcord Publishing Press, Timişoara, 2002.
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